Wicomico Youth & Civic Center gets a $7M upgrade

Paris Parker, of Salisbury, works to remove old seating from the Normandy Arena on Wednesday, Aug. 17, 2016. The arena level seating will eventually be replaced with motorized ones, which will expedite the expansion of the arena floor.(Photo: Staff photo by Ralph Musthaler)Buy Photo

Lime green seats, bright blue doors and other crayon colors that once adorned the Wicomico Youth & Civic Center have now gone the way of discos, leisure suits and other vestiges of the late 1970s as part of a $7 million upgrade to the facility.

New seating is now upholstered in charcoal instead of bright green, tile floors are being replaced with carpeting and block walls are being smoothed over to look like drywall.

“It’s a much more modern look,” said Charles Rousseau, the civic center manager.

The work is the first major rehabilitation of the facility since it was built in 1979 to replace a building that was destroyed by fire in 1977.

The upgrades are more than just cosmetic. The renovations include lower-tier seats in the Normandy Arena that can be retracted electronically.

Previously, it took six civic center staff members an entire day to pull out or retract seats on the lower level manually. Now it will take two people a couple of hours to do the same job.

“This will help when we have back-to-back events,” said County Executive Bob Culver.

County officials were able to save more than $53,000 on the electrical work for the new retractable seats by doing the work themselves.

The estimated cost for the seat replacement was almost $65,000, but county employees and work release inmates from the Wicomico County Detention Center got the job done for less than $11,500, including staff labor costs.

Renovations will be made to all of the public spaces except for the interior of the Midway Room, including new paint schemes, handrails, ceiling systems, flooring, paint schemes and energy-efficient lighting fixtures, Rousseau said.

Behind the scenes, the building’s internal network that serves computers, digital signage and cameras will be upgraded and floors in service areas will be polished concrete.

The renovation project is expected to be completed in early 2017, but Rousseau said he expects most of the work will be completed in time for the fall schedule which starts Sept. 30 with the Michael Blackson — Ugly is the New Cute Comedy Tour and Theresa Caputo, star of the TLC show Long Island Medium, on Oct. 1.

The renovation work is just one of the major changes coming to the civic center.

Buy Photo

An interior view of the Normandy Arena at the Wicomico Youth and Civic Center on Wednesday, Aug. 17, 2016. Current renovations include new seating, lighting and ceiling tiles.(Photo: Staff photo by Ralph Musthaler)

Rousseau said a beverage manager has been hired and staff will undergo training before the facility begins serving alcohol, possibly in time for the start of the fall schedule.

Alcohol sales at the civic center had been banned since the first facility opened in 1950. There was a commonly held belief that the county could not sell or distribute alcohol on the property because it was a condition set by the late S. Franklyn Woodcock and his wife Elizabeth when they donated 39 acres to the county for the facility and a veterans war memorial in 1946.

But recent research by Paul Wilber, the acting county attorney, showed that following several deed changes and transfers the no-alcohol rule no longer existed and the county could have been selling it there for the past 45 years.

The last time the issue of alcohol sales was raised was in 2012 with the release of an economic study of the civic center which recommended relaxing the facility's strict no-alcohol policy to attract new business.

At the time, county officials were under the belief that the original deed covenant was still in effect and they looked at ways to get around it, including transferring the no-alcohol rule to another recreation facility in the county.

The county has relaxed the rules a bit over the years by allowing bring-your-own-bottle parties and events, such as weddings, where the host supplies an open bar, but the facility has never allowed the sale of alcohol on the premises.